In the wake of the global pandemic known as COVID-19, retirees, along with those hoping to retire someday, have been shocked into a new awareness of the need for better risk management tools to handle longevity and aging. This paper offers an assessment of the status quo prior to the spread of...

We provide a novel test for the impact of wealth-destroying natural disasters on college decisions using Hurricane Harvey (Aug-Sep 2017). First, we compare enrollment and graduation outcomes at Texas public universities and colleges according to their student share from disaster-affected...

In this paper we study how households' financial vulnerability affects the propagation of housing and credit shocks. First, we estimate a non-linear model generating impulse responses that depend on the evolution of households' Debt to Service Ratio, i.e. the fraction of income that households...

This paper studies the evolution of mortgage debt and defaults between 2001 and 2013 using a large, nationally representative panel of credit reports. Our analysis suggests that the 2007-2009 spike in mortgage defaults was concentrated among borrowers with mid to high credit scores. Among those...

Until the modernizing reforms of the 19th century, the Islamic waqf played a massive role in the economy of the Middle East, the Balkans, and North Africa. Formally, it was a trust founded by an individual; income from the endowed assets financed designated services in perpetuity. The largest...

In this study, we examine the impact of the monetary easing policy announced by the Bank of Japan on October 31, 2014 on households’ willingness to borrow. This policy, called the Kuroda Bazooka, was not anticipated by the private sector, so it can be regarded as an exogenous shock. We use an...

Distributional accounts for households enable measurement, study developments and identify drivers of inequality. Distributional information on households' wealth is available from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey only for three points in time (2009 - 2018), while aggregates are...

Sustainable investing is growing into its moment. Funded pensions, which were among the first institutions to respond to sustainability concerns, are showing renewed interest in better ways to reflect responsible investing objectives, along with regulators, asset managers and shareholder groups....

There have been stark differences in the ability of low-income and high-income individuals to protect themselves during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a triple difference specification, we document that debt burdens contribute to this inequity by disproportionately increasing the cost to...

Transfers from parents - either in the form of gifts or inheritances - have received much attention as a source of inequality. This paper uses a 19-year panel of administrative data for the population of Norway to examine the share of the Total Inflows available to an individual (defined as the...